retrieving RAW over transparent gateway

We have a unique situation concerning retrieving RAW values from a DB2 database over Oracle's transparent gateway. The DB2 table we're retrieving data elements from has a primary key that is a binary string, which is the RAW datatype to Oracle. In SQL*Plus, a SELECT statement across the gateway automatically converts the RAW values to their readable HEX equivalent (so an 8-byte raw becomes a 16-byte HEX representation). However, when using a Visual Basic program that accesses [remote UNIX] Oracle through SQL*Net and Oracle Objects for OLE, the raw values from DB2 are not converted and appear as unreadable binary strings in the VB debugger.

The problem is that we do one 3-table join query over the gateway that returns several hundred rows (using the VB program), and for each row we need to access another table that is keyed on the same raw value. In SQL*Plus, we can query the additional table using the hex equivalent result of the original query and retrieve what we need. But the VB program never finds a match in the additional table using the raw key retrieved from the original query. We suspect that the big-endian/little-endian problem is happening here, and don't know how to get around it.

One additional note: we originally tried to get to the additional table using an outer join, but the gateway apparently doesn't know how to translate that to DB2, so it combines all 4 tables from DB2, sends them over the gateway, and lets Oracle figure out how to do the outer join. This results in using massive amounts of memory because these tables have nearly a million records in them, and we run out of extent space.

I suspect we'll need to get Oracle's support on this, but I thought I'd give the Oracle newsgroups a try and see if anyone has dealt with this. Thanks!

<remove 7of9 for e-mail replies>

--
Bill Jones                 e-mail addresses:
Computer Sciences Corp.         (work)  wjones14_at_csc.com
Norwich, Connecticut            (play)  billj_at_snet.net
(860) 437-5650     WWW:  http://pages.cthome.net/billj